This paper makes the case for what we call ‘logic-checking’. The paper begins by providing an overview of the development of fact-checking and of how fact-checking functions. As part of this discussion, we identify some limitations of fact-checking, including its reliance on testimony to function as intended. Such considerations, we argue, motivate logic-checking, which, when well articulated, can demonstrate that a piece of reasoning is flawed to an audience. What logic-checking involves (...) is set out and examples of logic-checking are provided. The objection that experts in informal logic conducting logic-checking will be biased, thus undermining the whole enterprise, is considered and rejected. (shrink)

Joseph E. Uscinski and Ryden W. Butler argue that fact-checking should be condemned to the dustbin of history because the methods fact-checkers use to select statements, consider evidence, and render judgment fail to stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry and threaten to stifle political debate. However, the premises upon which they build their arguments are flawed. By sampling from multiple “fact-checking agencies” that do not practice fact-checking on a regular basis in (...) a consistent manner, they perpetuate the selection effects they criticize and thus undermine their own position. Furthermore, not only do their arguments suffer from overgeneralization, they fail to offer empirical quantification to support some of their anecdotal criticisms. This rejoinder offers a study demonstrating a high level of consistency in fact-checking and argues that as long as unambiguous practices of deception continue, fact-checking has an important role to play in the United States and around the world. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMichelle Amazeen's rebuttal of Uscinski and Butler 2013 is unsuccessful. Amazeen's attempt to infer the accuracy of fact checks from their agreement with each other fails on its own terms and, in any event, could as easily be explained by fact checkers’ political biases as their common access to the objective truth. She also ignores the distinction between verifiable facts and unverifiable claims about the future, as well as contestable claims about the causes of political, social, and economic (...) phenomena. The social benefits that she claims for the fact-checking enterprise must, at the very least, be weighed against the strong possibility that what passes for fact checking is actually just a veiled continuation of politics by means of journalism rather than being an independent, objective counterweight to political untruths. (shrink)

This paper makes the case for what we call ‘logic-checking’. The paper begins by providing an overview of the development of fact-checking and of how fact-checking functions. As part of this discussion, we identify some limitations of fact-checking, including its reliance on testimony to function as intended. Such considerations, we argue, motivate logic-checking, which, when well articulated, can demonstrate that a piece of reasoning is flawed to an audience. What logic-checking involves (...) is set out and examples of logic-checking are provided. The objection that experts in informal logic conducting logic-checking will be biased, thus undermining the whole enterprise, is considered and rejected. (shrink)

This book examines the fact-checking strategies adopted by major platforms such as Meta, X, TikTok, and YouTube to combat misinformation, including third-party verification, AI tools, community-based systems, and government initiatives. Drawing on survey data and expert interviews from the US, Nigeria, India, and Lithuania, the study finds that human-led approaches are generally more trusted than AI or government-driven methods, particularly when transparency and independence are emphasized. The research highlights the trade-offs platforms face between content integrity and engagement, and (...) calls for more transparent, inclusive, and psychologically informed fact-checking systems to strengthen credibility online. (shrink)

Fact checking has become a prominent facet of political news coverage, but it employs a variety of objectionable methodological practices, such as treating a statement containing multiple facts as if it were a single fact and categorizing as accurate or inaccurate predictions of events yet to occur. These practices share the tacit presupposition that there cannot be genuine political debate about facts, because facts are unambiguous and not subject to interpretation. Therefore, when the black-and-white facts—as they appear (...) to the fact checkers—conflict with the claims produced by politicians, the fact checkers are able to see only (to one degree or another) “lies.” The examples of dubious fact-checking practices that we discuss show the untenability of the naïve political epistemology at work in the fact-checking branch of journalism. They may also call into question the same epistemology in journalism at large, and in politics. (shrink)

Cílem mého článku je podat kritiku fact-checkingu a navrhnout úpravy metodiky vedoucí ke zvýšení jeho epistemické relevance. Nejprve představím současný model fact-checkingu jako odvětví aplikované epistemologie, jeho metodiku a cíle. Dále vymezím a zhodnotím epistemické charakteristiky procesu fact-checkingu modelovaného coby typ přesvědčovacího dialogu. Jakou měrou by měl institucionalizovaný fact-checking ovlivňovat důvěru veřejnosti v hodnocená tvrzení? Jaké jsou epistemologické charakteristiky hodnotících kritérií fact checkingu? Kdy jsou fact-checkingová kritéria objektivní?

The need for automated fact-checking has become urgent with the rise of misleading content on social media. Recently, Fake News Classification (FNC) has evolved to incorporate justifications provided by fact-checkers to explain their decisions. In this work, we argue that an argumentative representation of fact-checkers’ justifications can improve the precision and explainability of FNC systems. To address this challenging task, we present LIARArg, a novel linguistic resource composed of 2,832 news and their justifications. LIARArg extends the (...) 6-label FNC dataset LIAR-PLUS with argumentation structures, leading to the first FNC dataset annotated with argument components (claim and premise) and fine-grained relations (attack, support, partial support and partial attack). To integrate argumentation in FNC, we propose a novel joint learning method combining, for the first time, Argument Mining and FNC which outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, especially for news with intermediate truthfulness labels. Besides, our experimental setting demonstrates that fine-grained relations allow an extra performance boost. We also show that the argumentative representation of human justifications can be exploited in a Chain-of-Thought manner both in prompts and model output, paving a promising avenue for research in explainable fact-checking. Finally, our fully automated pipeline shows that integrating argumentation into FNC is not only feasible but also effective. (shrink)

Political fact-checkers evaluate the truthfulness of politicians’ claims. This paper contributes to an emerging scholarly debate on whether fact-checkers treat political parties differently in a systematic manner depending on their ideology (bias). We first examine the available approaches to analyze bias and then present a new approach in two steps. First, we propose a logistic regression model to analyze the outcomes of fact-checks and calculate how likely each political party will obtain a truth score. We test our (...) model with a sample of fact-checks from Newtral, a major Spanish fact-checker. Our model would signal bias under two assumptions: a) all political parties are on average equally accurate in their statements; b) the verification method gives precise instructions and is implemented systematically. We investigate this second assumption with a series of interviews with Newtral fact-checkers. We show that standard verification protocols are so loosely implemented that fact-checks reflect a set of journalistic decisions, rather than a bias in the statistical sense. We call for a more rigorous definition of verification methods as a pre-requisite for an unbiased assessment of politician’s claims. (shrink)

The post-truth era is as much about defining truth as a concept as it is about identifying which truth is the truth. On one hand, many still subscribe to the idea of a singular, objective reality that can be accessed with the right epistemological tools. On the other hand, a pluralistic approach that embraces equally valid realities, where the positivist lens is just one of many, is becoming an increasingly acceptable explanation for our current social configuration. Truth is not just (...) debatable; it is experiential — personal, even. Reality has reproduced itself into fractured, competing versions depending on the observer, and as a result, discourse has morphed into a shadow of its former constructive self. When faced with this postmodern iteration of meaning, we grasp for explanations as to why others seem so committed to “wrong” realities, and we typically reach for one of three frameworks: pathology, strategy, or machinery. And they’re not enough. Pathology explains epistemic deviance as individual dysfunction, caused by cognitive failures, from bad heuristics to poor education. This locates the problem in the person, bringing forth appropriate interventions like media literacy and inoculation against false beliefs. Strategy blames individual agency, where people rationally engage in disinformation for personal gain. This framing is carried through the proposed fixes, such as combating information interference and manipulation. Machinery sees the problem as a systemic product, where algorithmic influence and institutional authority are understood as creating the necessary conditions for a post-truth reality. This explanation calls for structural and regulatory solutions, including platform regulation and anti-trust action against technological monopolies. What if all three explanations miss something more fundamental? Many draw upon some or all of these frameworks to create comprehensive solutions to the multiple reality “problem,” which itself points to something more foundational that operates underneath these interpretations of the issue. What if people are motivated by something deeper: the existential need to maintain their very being by projecting meaning? And what if the emergence of competing realities isn’t a breakdown of rational discourse or a failure of information systems, but the inevitable result of human beings asserting their right to exist meaningfully in this world? This is the starting point for contestivism: a paradigm that views social reality as perpetual contestation of meaning through and for power, where the stakes are nothing less than being itself. Rather than treating competing worldviews as pathology to cure, strategy to counter, or machinery to reconstruct, contestivism recognizes them as expressions of the fundamental human drive to defend meaning as a condition for existence. The paradigm reveals the structural grammar underlying all meaning contests — including the very debates about truth and reality that define our current moment. It provides analytical tools for understanding how meaning emerges, stabilizes, and transforms without requiring us to adjudicate which meanings are “correct” or assign moral judgment to their proponents. Most importantly, it acknowledges that these contests aren’t peripheral to social life — they are social life. This paper develops contestivism as both a theoretical framework and an analytical lens, demonstrating how it can illuminate phenomena from disinformation to political polarization to social change. By understanding social reality as perpetual contestation rather than fixed truth or infinite relativism, we gain tools for understanding the post-truth era not as a symptom of an underlying problem, but as an inescapable condition of human society. (shrink)

What can just about any philosophical person who agrees with many goals that are often considered feminist do in response to the problems of the world? Among many other things, they can do philosophy, online, on various social media platforms, to try to help steer the world in better directions, at least a little. -/- Now “doing philosophy” with these goals in mind can mean many different things to different people: there are many different ways to be engaged in “public (...) philosophy.” Here though I’ll briefly describe some what I have been doing for at least a few years, which could be described as a type of “philosophical fact-checking” that basically amounts to this: -/- when people and organizations make importantly problematic claims about philosophical and ethical issues that one has expertise in, provide responses and resources that correct that misinformation. (shrink)

This ethnographic study provides insights into how professional fact checkers at a major bureau are experiencing and responding to the emergence of generative AI technologies and the shift towards digital investigation amid funding cuts. We started the work in 2022, where we interviewed 35 fact checkers and editors through innovative and traditional ethnographic methods. Over two years and three field visits, we developed nuanced relationships with participants who shared their professional practices and personal concerns about navigating a changing (...) AI and misinformation landscape. With shifting priorities from Meta and uncertainty about fact checking’s future, we find that professional fact checkers are being forced to redefine their attitudes towards both fact checking and AI technologies in an increasingly automated (mis)information ecosystem. In this chapter we present an argument for recognising this shift as not just a funding problem, but a fundamental challenge to the institutional role of professional verification in democratic discourse. (shrink)

Fact-checking agencies assess and score the truthfulness of politicians’ claims to foster their electoral accountability. Fact-checking is sometimes presented as a quasi-scientific activity, based on reproducible verification protocols that would guarantee an unbiased assessment. We will study these verification protocols and discuss under which conditions fact-checking could achieve effective reproducibility. Through an analysis of the methodological norms in verification protocols, we will argue that achieving reproducible fact-checking may not help much in rendering (...) politicians accountable. Political fact-checkers do not deliver either reproducibility or accountability today, and there are reasons to think that traditional quality journalism may serve liberal democracies better. (shrink)

Las fake news se suelen caracterizar como contenidos, de modo que prevalece el planteamiento semántico. Aquí se propone un enfoque pragmático, donde son actos comunicativos intencionales. Esto permite entender las fake news desde los actos locucionarios, ilocucionarios y perlocucionarios. Esta triple versión de intencionalidad comunicativa permite una mejor intelección de la mala información (misinformation) y de la desinformación (disinformation), que se refleja con claridad en el caso económico.Para mitigar o neutralizar los daños causados por las fake news en el tejido (...) social, se suele recomendar la contrastación de hechos (fact checking). La contribución de la Economía Experimental —y, en concreto, la aportación de Alvin Roth (Premio Nobel de Economía 2012)— puede ser especialmente relevante en dos direcciones: (a) la actividad económica y (b) la Economía como actividad entrelazada con otras. Esto supone el contrastar hechos partiendo de la intencionalidad en la actividad económica, en cuanto tal y en su nexo con otras actividades humanas. A este respecto, las fake news convergen con la toma de decisiones económicas, en cuanto que ambas están surcadas por la intencionalidad y, además, tienen lugar en un contexto donde adquieren un perfil orientado a fines. (shrink)

We are thankful to Gerhard Schurz for his response (Schurz 2023) to our paper (Spelda et al. 2023). Spelda et al. (2023) shows how a variant of no-regret learning called meta-induction (Schurz 2008; 2019) can be used for optimal selection from available political alternatives and, as a result, also for increasing voter competence that has come under attack from mis/disinformation. Since our paper takes a first step in applying meta-induction to long-standing issues in Democratic Theory (e.g., the usefulness of jury (...) theorems for justifying democracy), we are grateful to Gerhard Schurz for highlighting some of the conditions that need to be met for the development of practical applications. (shrink)

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to transmit information in democratic societies presents a new problem for scientific objectivity. This paper extends objectivity from knowledge production to knowledge transmission. It analyses how an overlooked type of agent—knowledge intermediaries—produces an overlooked type of trust—external trust. In practice, citizens rely on intermediaries to transmit trustworthy information. This paper argues that centralised techno-legal approaches, privileging AIs as epistemically superior intermediaries, risk epistemic harm to human intermediaries. In contrast, a decentralised intermediaries approach that values (...) contestation among human intermediaries is a better way to transmit trustworthy information and resist misinformation. (shrink)

Like people, academic fields grow, acquire an identity, establish goals, and ultimately impact the world in various ways. Here we check in with our young friend Neuroethics—a field I want to see develop and thrive. This won't happen if it keeps returning to issues like cognitive enhancement or neural causation of behavior and responsibility, with minor adjustments of its analyses. Neuroethics is at its best when scanning the horizon for new scientific and technical developments that intersect in new ways with (...) ethics and law. Consider the development of open‐ and closed‐loop deep brain stimulation for behavioral disorders. Under what conditions are patients responsible for their behavior when it is influenced by an implanted system? Neuroethics has also increased understanding of people's beliefs and attitudes toward neuroscience and its applications because effective policy must take empirical facts into account. (shrink)

How should we talk to Angry Uncle, or attempt to persuade any very ignorant audience? This paper discusses several strategies, including fact dumping, consistency checking, pandering, and just being friendly. It defends the continued value of fact dumping and consistency checking despite skeptical doubts rooted in recent cognitive science literature about their strategic efficacy. Pandering and friendliness often fail to confront our audience with epistemic resistance and so face serious limitations as means of responding to ignorance. (...) Any reasonable view of how to talk to Angry Uncles must also consider how to meet relevant moral standards, such as showing respect for ourselves, our audience, and important social causes. Without some fact dumping and consistency checking, pandering and friendliness often fail to meet these standards. All in all, the various modes work best together, and it would be a mistake to conclude from unfavorable cognitive science research that we should avoid fact dumping and consistency checking in Angry Uncle exchanges. (shrink)

This is a brief report on results reported at length in our paper [2], made for the purpose of a presentation at the workshop to be held in November 2011 in Cambridge on the Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead ([?], hereinafter referred to briefly as PM ). That paper grew out of a reading of the paper [3] of Kamareddine, Nederpelt, and Laan. We refereed this paper and found it useful for checking their examples to write our own (...) independent computer type-checker for the type system of PM ([1]), which led us to think carefully about formalization of the language and the type system of PM A modern mathematical logician reading PM finds that it is not completely formalized in a modern sense. The type theory in particular is inarguably not formalized, as no notation for types is given at all! In PM itself, the only type annotations which appear are occasional numerical indices indicating order; the type notation we use here extends one introduced later by Ramsey. The authors of PM regard the absence of explicit indications of type as a virtue of their system: they call it “systematic ambiguity”; modern computer scientists refer to this as “polymorphism”. The language of PM is also not completely formalized, and it is typographically inconvenient for computer software to which ASCII input is to be given. The notation of PM for abstractions (propositional functions) does not use head binders; the order of the arguments of a complex expression is determined by the alphabetical order of the bound variables. For example ˆa < ˆb is the “less than” relation while ˆb < ˆa is the “greater than” relation (this is indicated by the alphabetical order of the variables). In PM , the fact that a variable is bound in a propositional function is indicated by circumflexing it. Variables bound by quantifiers are not circumflexed. A feature of the notation of [3], carried over into ours, is that no circumflexes are used: notations for propositions and the corresponding propositional functions are identical.. (shrink)

To subject a philosophical account of self-knowledge to a ‘reality check’ is to ask whether the proposed account is psychologically realistic. Just as behavioural economics tries to provide the discipline of economics with more realistic psychological foundations, so philosophical accounts of self-knowledge need to ensure that they also have realistic psychological foundations. The distinction between _homo sapiens_ and _homo philosophicus_ is similar to Thaler and Sunstein’s distinction between _homo sapiens_ and _homo economicus_. Rationalist and other philosophical accounts of self-knowledge are (...) open to the objection that they are psychologically unrealistic. However, the relevant psychological facts are not beyond dispute. A distinction is drawn between three different senses in which an account of self-knowledge can qualify, or fail to qualify, as an account of self-knowledge ‘for humans’, an _application_ sense, a _conception_ sense, and a _guidance_ sense. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss John Searle?s selective view of intentionality of mental states, and place it in the context of impairment to personal identity that occurs in mental illness. I criticize Searle?s view that intentionality characterizes some but not all mental states; I do so both on principled and on empirical grounds. I then proceed to examine the narrative theory of self, advanced by Paul Ricoeur, Marya Schechtman and others, and explore the extent to which the theory fits a (...) more generalized view of intentionality that would apply to all mental states. This discussion is followed by a brief consideration of the way in which the modern DSM-based psychiatric diagnosis and treatment, reductively and mechanistically, dispenses with the issues of?strong ontology?, namely the life events and values that mental states might in fact reach for, even when ostensibly without reference. In this sense, DSM-inspired psychiatry is based on a Searlian view of mental states. It is contrasted with the narrative theory of self which, rather than defining madness by clusters of symptoms, seeks to understand the underlying ontology of reference by looking for both the initial script of the person?s?life narrative? and for ruptures and knots in that narrative that might give rise to madness. Finally I discuss and evaluate the perspective of personality enhancement through counseling aimed at repairing the personal narrative. nema. (shrink)

It is frequently argued that false and misleading claims, spread primarily on social media, are a serious problem in need of urgent response. Current strategies to address the problem – relying on fact-checks, source labeling, limits on the visibility of certain claims, and, ultimately, content removals – face two serious shortcomings: they are ineffective and biased. Consequently, it is reasonable to want to seek alternatives. This paper provides one: to address the problems with misinformation, social media platforms should abandon (...) third-party fact-checks and rely instead on user-driven prediction markets. This solution is likely less biased and more effective than currently implemented alternatives and, therefore, constitutes a superior way of tackling misinformation. (shrink)

Abstract: There are epistemic manipulators in the world. These people are actively attempting to sacrifice epistemic goods for personal gain. In doing so, manipulators have led many competent epistemic agents into believing contrarian theories that go against well-established knowledge. In this paper, I explore one mechanism by which manipulators get epistemic agents to believe contrarian theories. I do so by looking at a prominent empirical model of trustworthiness. This model identifies three major factors that epistemic agents look for when trying (...) to determine who is trustworthy. These are (i) ability, (ii) benevolence, and (iii) moral integrity. I then show how manipulators can manufacture the illusion that they possess these factors. This leads epistemic agents to view manipulators as trustworthy sources of information. Additionally, I argue that fact-checking will be an ineffective – or even harmful – practice when correcting the beliefs of epistemic agents who have been tricked by this illusion of epistemic trustworthiness. I suggest that in such cases we should use an alternative correction, which I call trust undercutting. (shrink)

This paper discusses two methodological notions, the concepts Gegenprobe (countercheck) and Gegenversuch (counter-trial), which were widely applied, discussed, relied upon, and defended in German-language writings about empirical inquiry. In the decades around 1800, they were common in physiology; medicine; agriculture; chemistry; various technologies, such as printing, metallurgy, and mining; accounting; and legal and political argumentation. The ubiquity of those concepts signals a broad concern with securing empirical findings and empirical knowledge. Gegenproben and Gegenversuche – the terms as well as the (...) practices – are evidence for the close connection among explicitly knowledge-seeking endeavors and crafts and technologies. Physiological experiments, chemical analyses, agricultural or vaccination trials were indebted to applied and practical procedures of making and assaying. What united these different fields was the fact that the problems that had to be solved were very complex yet at the same time of immediate relevance to everyday lives (like diseases or crops) or highly controversial (like vital forces or spontaneous generation). We know that late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century practices of inquiry were firmly embedded in applied, technical contexts; this essay shows that methodological notions were anchored in applied, technical contexts as well. (shrink)

It is frequently argued that false and misleading claims, spread primarily on social media, are a serious problem in need of urgent response. Current strategies to address the problem – relying on fact-checks, source labeling, limits on the visibility of certain claims, and, ultimately, content removals – face two serious shortcomings: they are ineffective and biased. Consequently, it is reasonable to want to seek alternatives. This paper provides one: to address the problems with misinformation, social media platforms should abandon (...) third-party fact-checks and rely instead on user-driven prediction markets. This solution is likely less biased and more effective than currently implemented alternatives and, therefore, constitutes a superior way of tackling misinformation. (shrink)

Drawing upon case study research investigating the Irish Health Service Executive’s (HSE) response to a fake news attack on their human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination campaign, we argue that responses to fake news should be analyzed from a legitimacy perspective. A model for emotional legitimacy management is proposed in which the HSE and a third-party collaborate to (a) connect with the emotional aspects of the issue; (b) leverage emotions to build vicarious legitimacy; (c) transfer the third-party’s legitimacy to the HSE; and (...) (d) emotionally activate the public. This study contributes to fake news and legitimacy management by moving beyond fact-checking and debunking strategies. We suggest a framework centered on legitimacy in which emotions are used to counteract fake news. Finally, we emphasize the importance of third-party vicarious legitimacy building and the transfer of this legitimacy to the organization. (shrink)

The Public Policy Advisory Network on Female Genital Surgeries in Africa has written an article expressing concern about the media's inaccurate depiction of this practice and suggesting a more fact‐based approach to reporting on it. I applaud the network for soliciting input from various fields. I cannot agree more that some in the media have misconstrued, exaggerated, and used inflammatory language; words like “torture,” “barbaric,” and “horrific” will likely enrage readers while reinforcing discrimination against women who practice or have (...) undergone genital cutting. The authors also assert that “any genuine public policy debate should be grounded in the best available evidence and begins with fact checking.” Again, I couldn't agree more. My concern is that there is bias in the way some of the data are presented in this article. (shrink)

Why can't we seem to agree on facts? In this brief volume, sociologist Joel Best turns his inimitable eye toward the social construction of facts. He evaluates how facts emerge from our social worlds-including our beliefs, values, tastes, and norms-and according to those worlds' standards. By developing a sociological perspective towards what we think we know, he argues, we can better parse the use of facts and untruths around us. This book examines how facts are created and supported through science, (...) government, law, and journalism, revealing that facts are all claims. These claims are malleable and can change over time through fact-checking, revision, and sometimes rejection. Best guides us through these processes so that we can question our assumptions and understand why disputes happen in the first place. In a time of increasing social and political divide, Just the Facts urges us to resist defensiveness over our facts and approach our disputes in critical new ways. (shrink)

Affective polarization, characterized by entrenched partisan hostility, is increasingly threatening democratic norms by fostering exclusionary and uncivil discourse, particularly in digital spaces. This study investigates how individuals respond to fact checks that contradict their political beliefs in the polarized and authoritarian context of Turkey. Focusing on 1,543 user comments responding to 23 fact checks published by Teyit.org during the 2023 Turkish presidential elections, this analysis dissects the emotional tone, targets, and rhetorical strategies employed in online political discourse. A (...) key contribution of the study is distinguishing between uncivil comments, profane or insulting remarks primarily targeting political elites, and intolerant discourse, which directs hostility toward marginalized groups, posing a greater risk to democratic pluralism. Findings show that partisans, ignoring factual content, reframe fact checkers as biased actors and use tactics such as whataboutism, sarcasm, and source discrediting to reject inconvenient truths. The results also highlight how online polarization during elections sustains elite-focused antagonisms and facilitates social exclusion and the scapegoating of minorities. These dynamics illustrate that, though designed to promote truth, fact-checking efforts can become entangled in broader struggles over identity, trust, and legitimacy in deeply divided societies. (shrink)

It will be argued that the dominant form of current academic science is based on ideas and concepts about science and research that date back to philosophy and sociology that was developed since the 1930s. It will be discussed how this philosophy and sociology of science has informed the ideas, myths and ideology about science held by the scientific community and still determines the popular view of science. It is even more amazing when we realize that these ideas are philosophically (...) and sociologically untenable and since the 1970s were declared obsolete by major scholars in these same disciplines. To demonstrate this, I delve deep to discuss the distinct stages that scholars in philosophy, sociology and history of science since 1945 to 2000 have gone through to leave the analytical-positivistic philosophy behind. I will be focusing on developments of their thinking about major topics such as: how scientific knowledge is produced, the scientific method; the status of scientific knowledge and the development of our ideas about ‘truth’ and the relation of our claims to reality. It will appear that the positivistic ideas about science producing absolute truth, about ‘the unique scientific method’, its formal logical approach and its timeless foundation as a guarantee for our value-free, objective knowledge were not untenable. This is to show how thoroughly the myth has been demystified in philosophy and sociology of science. You think after these fifty pages I am kicking a dead horse? Not at all! This scientific demystification has unfortunately still not reached active scientists. In fact, the popular image of science and research is still largely based on a that Legend. This is not without consequence as will be shown in Chap. 3. These images of science have shaped and in fact distorted the organisational structures of academia and the interaction between its institutes and disciplines. It also affects the relationship of science with its stakeholders in society, its funders, the many publics private and public, and policy makers in government. In short, it determines to a large degree the growth of knowledge with major effects on society. (shrink)

This chapter reflects on facts. It looks at John D'Agata and Jim Fingal's book _The Lifespan of a Fact_. D'Agata is an essayist, while Fingal is a much younger man who had been hired by _The Believer_ as a fact-checker to review one of D'Agata's essays for publication. Fingal ended up writing more than a hundred pages’ worth of corrections on D'Agata's essay. However, D'Agata defended his facts and his choices. He gave up in the end, though; the version (...) of the essay that appeared in _The Believer_ was a fact-checked, corrected version. _The Lifespan of a Fact_ is a book they put together after the dust settled; it is a reconstruction of the exchanges, or really, their battle, as they work their way line by line through the original essay. But what makes the book remarkable is that it is a kind of staging of an investigation into such questions as: What is a fact? What is the truth? When is it okay, for the sake of a good story, to simplify, or change, or color facts? Is it possible to tell a story without doing so? Can one even draw a sharp line between fiction and non-fiction? (shrink)

The relationship between objective accounts of reality and expressions of subjective points of view has been discussed in journalism studies in terms of two dominant epistemological paradigms: the modern and the postmodern. This article proposes a different epistemological model, defined as ‘neomodern,’ whose aim is to articulate a dialectical relationship between subjectivity and objectivity that is better able to account for the processes of information production and consumption on digital platforms. An overview is given of the principles of the neomodern (...) model and its main exponents. To understand the implications of a neomodern epistemology when discussing the practices of contemporary journalism, the journalistic genre of fact-checking is analyzed as a case study. (shrink)

This chapter draws a connection between Herzog’s falsified epigraph to Lessons of Darkness and Kellyanne Conway’s claim that there are “alternative facts”. Philosophers have a commitment to the truth, but in cases like Herzog’s quote or Trump’s inauguration it’s very easy to fact-check. Being a good citizen may require that from us, but doing so leaves little to resolve philosophically. Thus, if Herzog raises a question about finding truth in an age of “alt-facts” and “fake news”, then it must (...) be about something other than finding “just the facts” or reporting “real news”. To uncover the more interesting question Herzog raises, I situate his role in the film as an unreliable narrator against Jean Baudrillard’s work to show how all of our interactions with the media put us into relationships with narratives and agendas that go beyond a commitment to the facts. The question then becomes: How can we respond to the uncertainty inherent in the claims and narratives developed by the media? To address the question, I argue that we should not fall victim to either resignation or self-serving cynicism. Instead, by turning to Gilles Deleuze’s politics of affirmation we can see that our exposure to media is less about getting facts per se than in developing relationships with media where we can have some degree of trust. By looking at interviews with Herzog, I claim that his understanding of “ecstatic truth” vs. the “accountant’s truth” suggests that he would support an affirmation of truth beyond the facts rather than a return to a mythical time of “just the facts.” . (shrink)

Politics is full of people who don't care about the facts. Still, while not caring about the facts, they are often concerned to present themselves as caring about them. Politics, in other words, is full of bullshitters. But why? In this paper I develop an incentives-based analysis of bullshit in politics, arguing that it is often a rational response to the incentives facing different groups of agents. In a slogan: bullshit in politics pays, sometimes literally. After first outlining an account (...) of bullshit, I discuss the incentives driving three different groups of agents to bullshit: politicians, the media, and voters. I then examine several existing proposals to combat bullshit in politics, arguing that each will fail because they ignore the relevant underlying incentives. I conclude somewhat pessimistically that a certain amount of bullshit in politics is inevitable. (shrink)

The modern day is known as the “post-truth” era, characterized by the widespread dissemination of false information, as well as personal opinions and emotions taking precedence over established facts in public decision-making. For students, as future democratically engaged citizens, to make well-informed science-based decisions on matters of personal health and public policy, they require the knowledge and skills to identify false from accurate scientific information online. In this article, I argue that current school science curriculum are outdated in the context (...) of modern social media and internet-centric media environment, requiring changes in education to successfully prepare students for some of the more pernicious features of the post-truth era. An increased focus on forms of social and digital media literacy, as well as knowledge about how science produces reliable information, are essential content for addressing this issue. It is important to emphasize that focusing on content-based changes alone is not sufficient. Methodological shifts are needed to ensure that the socially embedded aspects of scientific knowledge production and the application of knowledge in socio-political contexts are taught and communicated in ways that allows students to effectively employ their content-based education. (shrink)

ABSTRACTTaking some controversial claims philosopher Jason Brennan makes in his book Against Democracy as a starting point, this paper argues in favour of two theses: There is No Such Thing as Superior Political Judgement; There Is No Such Thing as Uncontroversial Social Scientific Knowledge. I conclude that social science experts need to be kept in check, not given more power.

This paper develops a novel account of the nature of disinformation that challenges several widely spread theoretical assumptions, such as that disinformation is a species of information, a species of misinformation, essentially false or misleading, essentially intended/aimed/having the function of generating false beliefs in/misleading hearers. The paper defends a view of disinformation as ignorance generating content: on this account, X is disinformation in a context C iff X is a content unit communicated at C that has a disposition to generate (...) ignorance at C in normal conditions. I also offer a taxonomy of disinformation, and a view of what it is for a signal to constitute disinformation for a particular agent in a particular context. The account, if correct, carries high stakes upshots, both theoretically and practically: disinformation tracking will need to go well beyond mere fact checking. (shrink)

An increased focus on fake news and misinformation is currently emerging. But what does it mean when information is designated as “fake?” Research on deception has focused on lies of commission, in which people disclose something false as true. However, people can also lie by omission, by withholding important yet true information. In this research, we investigate when people are more likely to tell a lie of omission. In three studies, with tests among undergraduates, online sample respondents, and candidates for (...) U.S. Senate, we found that people in a gain frame were more likely to lie by omission (vs. commission), and vice versa for a loss frame. Moreover, participants rated lies of commission in a gain frame as the least acceptable type of deception, suggesting why people may avoid telling this kind of lie. Overall, our results emphasize that from frame-to-frame, lying is not only different in degree but different in kind. (shrink)

This book offers a truly interdisciplinary exploration of our patterns of engagement with politics, news, and information in current high-choice information environments. Putting forth the notion that high-choice information environments may contribute to increasing misperceptions and knowledge resistance rather than greater public knowledge, the book offers insights into the processes that influence the supply of misinformation and factors influencing how and why people expose themselves to and process information that may support or contradict their beliefs and attitudes. A team of (...) authors from across a range of disciplines address the phenomena of knowledge resistance and its causes and consequences at the macro- as well as the micro-level. The chapters take a philosophical look at the notion of knowledge resistance, before moving on to discuss issues such as misinformation and fake news, psychological mechanisms such as motivated reasoning in processes of selective exposure and attention, how people respond to evidence and fact-checking, the role of political partisanship, political polarization over factual beliefs, and how knowledge resistance might be counteracted. This book will have a broad appeal to scholars and students interested in knowledge resistance, primarily within philosophy, psychology, media and communication, and political science, as well as journalists and policymakers. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. (shrink)

Esta tesis pretende ofrecer una reflexión desde la filosofía moral a uno de los desórdenes informativos de mayor impacto en la esfera pública, las fake news. Esta mirada alternativa a la ética periodística o a la comunicación política, es la ética cívica. El hilo conductor de este itinerario no será ya la modernización mediática con sus implicaciones en los usuarios, como plantea la teoría de la mediación, sino la tecnologización a través de las redes sociales y de la inteligencia artificial. (...) Esta tesis parte de la premisa de que la generación de la opinión pública ya no recae exclusivamente en la industria mediática, sino también en los usuarios. El segundo problema de la digitalización es la dilución de la verdad precisamente porque los internautas carecen por un lado del criterio periodístico, de su rigor y de su responsabilidad para hacerse con información y para compartirla en redes sociales y por otro, la ingente oferta desinformativa que ha emergido a través de sitios web piratas de noticias, cuentas fantasmas de bots o grupos radicales políticos que alimentan la polarización y ello ocurre emulando la técnica periodística de redacción y de estética. En esta vorágine de desinformación está inmerso el analfanauta digital, un usuario carente de competencias mediáticas para acceder, analizar, usar y crear contenido con pensamiento crítico y con responsabilidad. En la primera parte de la tesis se rebate la idea de que la desinformación sea un problema exclusivo del periodismo y se propone una aproximación desde la teoría crítica. En este primer apartado se defiende la idea de que las fake news son una patología social, pues no se trata solo de mimetizar el lenguaje y el estilo periodístico para engañar, sino que hace cómplice al lector al inducirlo a compartir desinformación. Y esta elección siempre es personal; entran en juego factores cognitivos, políticos y psicológicos. En la segunda parte, se presentan dos respuestas desde la técnica periodística: la verificación de datos y la alfabetización mediática. La crítica está cuando ocurre lo que Ortega y Gasset denominaba el tecnicismo de la técnica, por ello argumentaré que el culmen del fact-checking está en su capacidad pedagógica y no solo en la corroboración sobre la veracidad de una afirmación; sobre la alfabetización mediática, no puede quedarse solo en instruir a usuarios en destrezas técnicas, sino también en competencias ético-cívicas. La tercera parte se encargará de la configuración de un ciudadano digital revestido de la ética cívica y es capaz de luchar contra la pauperización del debate público y de asumir su papel protagónico en la esfera pública digital. La cuarta y última parte aspira dar cuenta del déficit epistemológico de la ética cívica, y para ello se propone una infoética cordial que concilia las competencias mediáticas y las competencias morales junto con la responsabilidad epistémica, la capacidad hermenéutica y el discernimiento entre veracidad (adecuación) y la dimensión moral de una verdad práctica emancipadora. (shrink)

The author defines and analyzes a practice central to inquiry: treating things as relevant to questions. This notion helps illuminate what lines of inquiry are, how those lines unfold, and how to evaluate them. When applied to the context of news journalism, we can use the notion of lines of inquiry to understand how questions get built into frames that give shape to news stories. Armed with this concept, we can then better understand the roles of lines of inquiry in (...) journalism, and see more clearly how to evaluate news stories not just by fact-checking, but also by considering which facts should be selected to build a story to begin with. (shrink)

The explosion of interest in large language models (LLMs) has been accompanied by concerns over the extent to which generated outputs can be trusted, owing to the prevalence of bias, hallucinations, and so forth. Accordingly, there is a growing interest in the use of ontologies and knowledge graphs to make LLMs more trustworthy. This rests on the long history of ontologies and knowledge graphs in constructing human-comprehensible justification for model outputs as well as traceability concerning the impact of evidence on (...) other evidence. Understanding the nature of arguments and argumentation is critical to each, especially when LLM output conflicts with what is expected by users. The central contribution of this article is to extend the Arguments Ontology (ARGO) - an ontology specific to the domain of argumentation and evidence broadly construed - into the space of LLM fact-checking in the interest of promoting justification and traceability research through the use of ARGO-based ‘blueprints’. (shrink)

Guarding against reliance on his own biography and romantic tendencies in Bildungsroman literature, I draw parallels to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s use of the journey trope and place-based inquiry in the Philosophical Investigations, as an exploration of concept development and confusion that exhorts and guides readers in traversing the borderlands of their own cultural–linguistic practices. l recall Wittgenstein’s journey in search of himself: his retreat from Cambridge to a remote hut in Norway, leading him on a philosophical search for meaning. This self-transformative (...) (Bildung) process of writing the Philosophical Investigations offers new ways for thinking the concept of ‘place’: not the bounding limit of things/beings; rather, working through the linguistic turn in philosophy, as potentially meaningful ‘sites’ in conceptually familiar/unfamiliar landscapes of native languages. The Investigations also carries ancient Heraclitian and Homeric tropes of homecoming and authenticity: ‘searching ourselves’ and ‘becoming who we are’, as found in Wittgenstein’s call to ‘know our way about’—rediscovering the grammatical order operating out of view but pervading the world as we see and know it, as well as setting its limits. Awareness of different languages of place is crucial to appreciating Indigenous discourses of Land-based education—a topic central to discussions of incorporating Indigenous knowledge while decolonizing education. Rethinking Bildungsroman literature in postcolonial terms—through the lens of reconciliation, renaissance, and resurgence —I call for careful listening to Indigenous peoples’ storied landscapes instead of fact-checking them: recognizing their sovereign right to self-govern their own education and resources. The goal is not to assess the truths of Land-based education, as in some epistemological inquiries, nor to make them accessible as pedagogical resources or instruments for non-Indigenous educators. The aim rather is to promote respect for its deep, nearly inaccessible context within Indigenous grammars and ways of life. (shrink)

Fake news has been the focus of debate, especially since the election of Donald Trump (2016), and remains a topic of concern in democratic countries worldwide, given (a) their threat to democratic systems and (b) the difficulty in detecting them. Despite the deployment of sophisticated computational systems to identify fake news, as well as the streamlining of fact-checking methods, appropriate fake news detection mechanisms have not yet been found. In fact, technological approaches are likely to be inefficient, (...) given that fake news are based mostly on partisanship and identity politics, and not necessarily on outright deception. However, as disinformation is inherently expressed linguistically, this is a privileged room for forensic linguistic analysis. This article builds upon a forensic linguistic analysis of fake news pieces published in English and in Portuguese, which were collected since 2019 from acknowledged fake news outlets. The preliminary empirical analysis reveals that fake news pieces employ particular linguistic features, e.g. at the levels of typography, orthography and spelling, and morphosyntax. The systematic identification of these features, which will allow mapping linguistic resources and patterns used in those contexts, contributes to scholarship, not only by enabling a streamlined development of computational detection systems, but more importantly by permitting the forensic linguistics expert to assist criminal investigations and give evidence in court. (shrink)

Humans have traditionally been an integral part of artificial intelligence systems as a means of generating labeled training data [5, 26, 42, 48, 54, 64, 73]. Such a paradigm has been proven to be effective in supervised learning tasks such as image classification [13], speech recognition [20], autonomous driving [65], social media mining [83], and virtual reality [61]. However, it also suffers from two key limitations. First, some applications (e.g., disaster response and damage assessment, online truth discovery) may require a (...) large amount of training data to achieve reasonable performance, which could be impractical due to the labor cost [22, 37]. Second, the AI models are often black-box systems and it is difficult to diagnose in the event of failure or unsatisfactory performance. To address these limitations, a few human-AI hybrid frameworks have been developed in recent years. For example, Holzinger et al. proposed the notion of interactive human machine learning (“iML”), where humans directly interact with AI by identifying useful features that could be incorporated into the AI algorithms [23]. Branson et al. invented a human-in-the-loop visual recognition system to accurately classify the objects in the picture based on the descriptions of the picture from humans [7]. More recently, researchers have been interested in diagnosing the black-box AI algorithms to provide accountability. For example, Nushi et al. developed an accountable human-AI system that leverages workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) to identify the limitations of the AI algorithms [49] and provide suggestions to improve them. However, the above solutions largely ignored the innate limitations of the AI algorithms that cannot be simply improved by retraining the model with more data. Human-AI interaction is a trending research area that aims at harnessing the power of human intelligence and AI to optimize the human-AI systems and improve human experience with AI [11, 40, 52, 56, 71]. Such a paradigm has been applied in many domains, including image classification [50, 60], natural language translation [6, 86], medical diagnosis [14, 39], and autonomous driving [74, 84]. More recently, a few human-AI interaction systems have been developed to explore the human intelligence of crowd workers through interactive crowdsourcing tasks [41, 46]. For example, Nguyen et al. designed a human-AI interactive news article fact-checking algorithm that checks the truthfulness of textual news and claims by assigning crowd workers to correct identification errors by AI models [46]. Mandel et al. developed a game-based crowdsourcing interface to incorporate a crowd of non-AI experts to reason the dynamics of AI misbehavior and improve AI performance in online advertisement recommendations [41]. However, these solutions either assume the human workers have sufficient domain knowledge or require them to be well-trained on domain-specific crowdsourcing tasks. Such approaches often suffer from noisy crowdsourcing results since the ordinary crowd workers usually do not have the essential domain knowledge for the domain-specific tasks or are not interested in those training tasks [29, 76]. Future works in the direction of human-AI collaboration systems are expected to address some of these limitations. (shrink)

In late March of 2020, a new hashtag, #FilmYourHospital, made its first appearance on social media. The hashtag encouraged people to visit local hospitals to take pictures and videos of empty hospitals to help “prove” that the COVID-19 pandemic is an elaborate hoax. Using techniques from Social Network Analysis, this case study examines how this conspiracy theory propagated on Twitter and whether the hashtag virality was aided by the use of automation or coordination among Twitter users. We found that while (...) much of the content came from users with limited reach, the oxygen that fueled this conspiracy in its early days came from a handful of prominent conservative politicians and far right political activists on Twitter. These power users used this hashtag to build awareness about the campaign and to encourage their followers to break quarantine and film what is happening at their local hospitals. After the initial boost by a few prominent accounts, the campaign was mostly sustained by pro-Trump accounts, followed by a secondary wave of propagation outside the U.S. The rise of the #FilmYourHospital conspiracy from a single tweet demonstrates the ongoing challenge of addressing false, viral information during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the spread of misinformation can be potentially mitigated by fact-checking and directing people to credible sources of information from public health agencies, false and misleading claims that are driven by politics and supported by strong convictions and not science are much harder to root out. (shrink)

The spread of fake news online has far reaching implications for the lives of people offline. There is increasing pressure for content sharing platforms to intervene and mitigate the spread of fake news, but intervention spawns accusations of biased censorship. The tension between fair moderation and censorship highlights two related problems that arise in flagging online content as fake or legitimate: firstly, what kind of content counts as a problem such that it should be flagged, and secondly, is it practically (...) and theoretically possible to gather and label instances of such content in an unbiased manner? In this paper, I argue that answering either question involves making value judgements that can generate user distrust toward fact checking efforts. (shrink)

The "World Converts Day" narrative represents more than a simple viral hoax—it embodies the complex interplay between digital disinformation ecosystems, institutional religious authority, and Indonesia's ongoing project of maintaining religious harmony within democratic pluralism. While factually baseless, its persistence demonstrates how digital spaces can amplify marginal voices into seemingly legitimate movements that challenge established frameworks of religious moderation. Countering such narratives requires more than fact-checking; it demands rebuilding institutional credibility, strengthening digital literacy across demographic groups, and consistently modeling (...) inclusive religious engagement through concrete policies and practices. Indonesia's experience suggests that sustainable religious harmony in the digital age requires proactive institutional positioning rather than merely reactive corrections. The true measure of success lies not in eliminating controversial narratives entirely—which may be impossible—but in ensuring they remain marginal to mainstream religious discourse where moderation, dialogue, and mutual respect remain the dominant paradigms. (shrink)